Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Obama Sends In Large Contingent Of Ground Troops

Yes, President Obama has given the orders and has set a brand new objective for our military. But it's definitely not ISIS, fighting jihad or protecting our borders.

In fact, (forget about the border) he's actually cutting back on counterterrorism efforts to send 3,000 US troops on an unclear mission to Monrovia, Liberia in West Africa, the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.

According to what President Obama's Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey has reportedly told senior officers, “The Department of Defense’s number one priority is combating Ebola.”

Even the White house appears unclear on exactly what the soldiers are going to be doing.

'U.S. Africa Command will set up a Joint Force Command headquartered in Monrovia, Liberia, to provide regional command and control support to U.S. military activities and facilitate coordination with U.S. government and international relief efforts,' a statement from the White House press office said.

'A general from U.S. Army Africa, the Army component of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), will lead this effort, which will involve an estimated 3,000 U.S. forces.'

All of which are hazy, non-specific and generic terms. What does 'regional command and control support for U.S. military activities' mean? What U.S. military activities are being planned? Are they basically being sent into a dangerous area where a highly contagious disease is running rampant to be policemen of some kind, enforcing some other country's law and order? Maybe several countries?

And the president's rationale for this is frankly ridiculous at a time when our military is already stretched thin, thousands of personnel have been released from the service and defense spending has already been cut 21 per cent since 2010, President Obama's first fiscal year in office.

On a Sept. 7 interview on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' as reported by the UK's Daily Mail, President Obama called the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a 'national security priority.'

'If we don't make that effort now, and this spreads not just through Africa, but other parts of the world, there's the prospect then that the virus mutates, it becomes more easily transmittable, and then it could be a serious danger to the United States,” said Obama.

So let's get this straight...the way to stop Ebola from being transmitted to the U.S. is not by policing our borders, cracking down on illegal migration, or quarantining nationals and limiting visas from the affected countries.

Instead, the president obviously feels that the way to stop Ebola from becoming a problem in America is to ignore all these things and send 3,000 soldiers we can't really spare right now into the middle of an epidemic. Can you think of a better way to bring Ebola home to America?

I can certainly see humanitarian aid, and apparently military engineers are going to slap together some makeshift hospitals. The U.S has done similar things before. But the biggest hospital project the U.S. has committed to isn't for the locals. It's a fully equipped 25-bed 'field-deployable hospital,' that will be used solely to treat infected health care personnel and presumably those members of our military that become infected.

And the State Department, tellingly, has just purchased 5,000 body bags.

Why is the president doing this? Obviously this is not a 'national security issue'. But when it come to President Obama, there are two motivating factors you can always count on...politics and his own ego and aggrandizement.

The politics are pretty simple. With the midterms coming up, it's yet another way to dupe African-American voters into thinking that Obama cares about them, even though for all practical purposes their voting bloc is being taken for granted and has been dumped to cater to Latinos.

The ego and aggrandizement? That's pretty simple too. In spite of that totally unearned Nobel Peace Prize, in spite of all the rhetoric, President Obama has actually done very little in the way of humanitarian efforts, especially when you compare him to President Bush,who is particularly beloved in Africa for his efforts to combat AIDS and hunger. So this becomes an Obama bragging point - at other people's risk and expense, of course.